In Memoriam: Jim Griffin

Jim Griffin

Retired Fermilab employee James "Jim" Griffin, a Fermilab pioneer who helped to design and commission more than 18 of the laboratory's key radio frequency systems, died July 17. He was 84.

Griffin joined the National Accelerator Laboratory, as Fermilab was then called, in 1969 just as the facility was under construction. During the next 19 years, Griffin was intimately involved in many of the laboratory's milestones.

John Peoples, former Fermilab director who shepherded the Antiproton Source to completion, said that Griffin was one of the Antiproton Source, or Pbar, heroes.

"In the late 1970s, we weren't sure of the right technology for the Pbar," Peoples said. "Jim's ideas for magically shaping the proton beams with the RF techniques he knew so well guided us to the two-ring Antiproton Source that we chose in 1982. His ideas are the core of today's Antiproton Source RF systems."

Peoples credits Griffin for coming up with imaginative ways of using bunch coalescing, bunching and debunching. Along the way he invented barrier buckets, which are used in many stages of antiproton cooling.

"Jim was very skilled at turning his ideas into systems that he could build," Peoples said. "These techniques made the Tevatron luminosity exceed our expectations."

Griffin applied the conscientiousness and patience he showed in his work to the rest of his life.

"There is no question that I greatly admired him," said colleague Jim Maclachlan. "He was one of the most decent people that I have ever met, and he was always generous with his time."

Griffin was a fellow in the American Physical Society Division of Particles and Fields and a member of Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society. Griffin and his wife, Marilyn, also began the laboratory's International Folk Dancing club.

"Griffin was wonderful to work with," Peoples said. "He carried himself quietly, but his ideas spoke very clearly. I find it a joy to think back almost 30 years to when we were building the Pbar Source and the elation we all had when it worked."

Griffin is survived by Marilyn, their five children and eight grandchildren.

-- Rhianna Wisniewski

Jim Griffin (second from right) celebrates with colleagues on March 1, 1972, after they accelerated a 200 GeV beam around the Main Ring for the first time. Griffin was integral to the success of that project.

Photo of the Day

Seeking shade

Weingang Geng took this photo of great egrets and a great blue heron sitting in a tree near Wilson Hall in the early afternoon of July 28.

In the News

Rumors in astrophysics spread at light speed

From the New York Times, Aug. 2, 2010

Dimitar Sasselov, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, lit up the Internet last month with a statement that would stir the soul of anyone who ever dreamed of finding life or another home in the stars.

Brandishing data from NASA's Kepler planet-finding satellite, during a talk at TED Global 2010 in Oxford on July 16, Dr. Sasselov said the mission had discovered 140 Earthlike planets in a small patch of sky in the constellation Cygnus that Kepler has been surveying for the last year and a half.

"The next step after Kepler will be to study the atmospheres of the planets and see if we can find any signs of life," he said.

Last week, Dr. Sasselov was busy eating his words. In a series of messages posted on the Kepler Web site Dr. Sasselov acknowledged that should have said "Earth-sized," meaning a rocky body less than three times the diameter of our own planet, rather than "Earthlike," with its connotations of oxygenated vistas of blue and green. He was speaking in geophysics jargon, he explained.

Software collaborations help physics

Ruth Pordes, associate head of Fermilab's Computing Division, wrote this week's column.

Ruth Pordes

Most of Fermilab's scientific software development activities involve broad, and even multi-disciplinary, collaborations across many Department of Energy laboratories and universities.

Two recent events highlight these collaborations: the DOE's Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing 2010 annual meeting and the contributions of the Open Science Grid to the Tevatron's Run II and the LHC's results. Both of these were recently discussed at the International Conference on High Energy Physics.

At SciDAC 2010, a panel of industry experts selected the Community Petascale Project for Accelerator Science and Simulation, led by Panagiotis Spentzouris, as a 2010 SciDAC breakthrough. The panel chair said COMPASS carved a "..rightful new place for accelerator modeling on the high performance and exascale computing challenge map."

The breadth of the science presented at these conferences continues to amaze me. Some of the topics hit close to home, including: lattice quantum chromo dynamics, accelerator modeling and the unique computing challenges the scientists working on the LHC are solving.

Achieving these results requires partnerships between Fermilab physicists, physicists from multiple laboratories and computer science groups that help scientists with performance analysis and tuning, workflow and other software methodologies.

Fermilab users, the Computing Division and the CMS Center are major partners in the Open Science Grid - a very broad community including physics collaborations, other sciences and distributed computing computer science groups.

It is gratifying to see how this culture of sharing has enabled DZero to gradually increase their event simulation scale by using more and more remote sites. CDF has similarly benefited. They can add sites using the software system developed by the high-energy physics, internet technology and computer science communities.

OSG also allows the U.S ATLAS and U.S. CMS collaborations to make significant contributions in data distribution and processing. The computing and software services provided in the U.S. have withstood well the increased workloads seen in preparation for conferences such as ICHEP.

It is exciting to see how CD computing collaborations, especially with our partner DOE laboratories and the university Fermilab users, continue to foster and stimulate a "whole larger than the parts" in many areas of software and computing - contributing to the science results reported!

Safety Update

ES&H weekly report, Aug. 3

This week's safety report, compiled by the Fermilab ES&H section, includes four incidents. Two incidents resulted in injuries, including one DART case. No injuries were reported in the other two incidents, which resulted when drivers were backing up their vehicles. Find the full report here.